Quotes by Ally Condie

For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey between footsteps makes up our lives.

If you love someone, if someone loved you, if they taught you to write and made it so you could speak, how can you do nothing at all? You might as well take their words out of the dirt and try to snatch them from the wind.Because once you love, it is gone. You love and you cannot call it back.

Ky gives me three gifts for my birthday. A poem, a kiss and the hopeless, beautiful belief that things might work. When I open my eyes... I say, I didnt give you anything for your birthday, i dont even know when it is. And he says, Dont worry about that and I say, What can I do? and he answers, Let me believe in this, all of this, and you believe it too.And I do.

What did you think about? I wish I could tell him that I thought about him, but I lied to him once and I wont do it again. And besides, I wasnt thinking about Xander either. I thought about angels, I say.Angels?You know. The ones in the old stories. How they can fly to heaven. Do you think anyone believes in them anymore? He asks.I dont know. No. Do you?I believe in you, he says, his voice hushed and almost reverent. Thats more faith than I ever thought Id have.

Its been so long since Ive let myself feel anger that I dont just feel it. It covers my mouth and I swallow it down, the taste sharp and metal as though Im gnawing through foilware.

But if you were matched, I say softly, What do you think shed be like?You, he says, almost before Ive finished. You,

This is a difficult balance, telling the truth: how much to share, how much to keep, which truths will wound but not ruin, which will cut too deep to heal.

Until now, Ive never been able to see while I fly, and I feel a dizzying lightness as I look out at the land bel

No, she says, as if the suggestion is ridiculous. I wouldnt go back to where Im from. Id go someplace Ive never been.

Good-bye,” I say to Grandfather, and to my father, and I hold the tube in the river and pause a moment. We hold the choices of our fathers and mothers in our hands and when we cling on or let them slip between our fingers, those choices become our own.

Did you know Grandfather would give the poems to me?” I ask.“We thought he might,” my mother says.“Why didn’t you stop him?”“We didn’t want to take away your choices,” my mother says.“But Grandfather never did tell me about the Rising,” I say.“I think he wanted you to find your own way,” my mother says. She smiles. “In that way, he was a true rebel. I think that’s why he chose that argument with your father as his favorite memory. Though he was upset when the fight happened, later he came to see that your father was strong in choosing his own path, and he admired him for it.

They were too much to carryso i left them behindfor a new life, in a new placebut no one forgot who i wasi didntand neither did the people who watchthey watched for yearsthey watch now

It strikes me that perhaps this is part of what we are fighting to choose. Which pain to feel.

I never needed the Society, she says, to Match me. (-Lei)

It was a little thing, a baby tree, but still it tangled with things around it and required care to move. And when she pulled it out, its roots still clung to Earth from its old home.

The earth reflects the sky and the sky meets the earth and, every now and then, if were lucky, we have a moment to see how small we are.

...theres a difference between knowledge and technology. Knowledge dont fail us.

For one entire day I let his kiss burn on my cheek and into my blood and I dont push the memory away... This kiss, these words, they feel like beginning.

Thank you, I tell Xander. I didnt get anything for you -Its all right, he says, but maybe - you could -He looks into my eyes and I know what he wants. A kiss. Even thought he knows about Ky. Xander and I are still connected; this is still good-bye. I know already that that kiss would be sweet. It would be what he would hold on to, as I hold on to Kys.But thats something I dont think I can give. Xander -Its all right, he was, and then he stands up. I do too, and he reaches for me, pulls me close.

If you stay here, you become lost. And no one can find you. I like lost.